What Makes You You
10. Freedom and Responsibility
decide to tackle Kabir. Since he could have decided not to tackle Kabir, and since he did decide to tackle Kabir, we are open to thinking of the tackling as something he did freely.
But if determinism is true, then not only your actions but also your (and Clay’s) decisions are determined. With this in mind, we can revise the Argument from Determinism as follows:
The Argument from Determined Decision (DT1) Determinism is true
(DT2*) If determinism is true, then you are never able to decide to do otherwise
(DT3*) If you are never able to decide to do otherwise, then none of your actions are free
(DT4) So, none of your actions are free
DT2* is just as plausible as DT2: if determinism is true then everything about you, including what goes on in your brain, is determined by factors outside your control. And DT3* is no longer threatened by HYPNOTIC BACKUP. As I said, HYPNOTIC BACKUP
gives us reason to reject DT3 only insofar as we were thinking that Clay could have decided not to tackle Kabir. In order to challenge DT3*, we’d need to change the case so that Clay couldn’t even have decided not to tackle Kabir. But when we revise the case in that way, our sense that he may still have been acting freely vanishes altogether.
no one is responsible for things they do when they are in a hypnotic trance). Nor does anyone genuinely deserve praise or blame for anything they do. Accepting the arguments of this chapter requires drastically rethinking our assessments of people and their actions.
If no one is responsible or blameworthy for the things that they do, does it mean that no one should ever be punished for wrongdoing? Not necessarily. What’s true is that people should not be punished because they deserve it or because they’re to blame for what they’ve done. But it still makes good sense to punish people—and to threaten would-be criminals with punishment—
to the extent that this has a positive effect on their behavior. In a world without free will, punishment must be seen as “forward- looking” as opposed to “backward-looking.” We should punish people because punishment (and the threat thereof) has certain desirable consequences, not because it “sets things right” by addressing some past wrongdoing.
Reflection Questions
1. Premise DS1 of the Desire Argument says that what you choose to do is always determined by your desires. But isn’t what you choose to do also at least partly determined by your beliefs? For instance, whether your desire for Taco Bell causes you to go to Taco Bell depends in part on whether you believe that Taco Bell is open for business. Can this observation about the influence of beliefs be used to challenge to Desire Argument?
2. Can the Argument from Undesired Actions be defended against the sorts of objections I raise in section 4? Are there better examples of undesired actions, which escape my objections?
3. Premise DM5 of the Doomed Regardless Argument (section 8) says that every action is either determined to happen or random. Is there really no middle ground?
4. At the end of section 9, I said that the HYPNOTIC BACKUP case cannot be revised to serve as a counterexample to DT3* of the Argument from Determined Decisions. Is that true?
Sources
Both the Desire Argument and the Argument from Determinism can be found in Baron d’Holbach’s “Of the System of Man’s Free Agency.” The Consequence Argument in section 9.1 is drawn from Peter van Inwagen’s Essay on Free Will, and the hypnotic backup case in section 9.2 is a variation on an example from Harry Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.”
For discussion of whether quantum mechanics is at odds with determinism, see Tim Maudlin’s “Distilling Metaphysics from Quantum Physics.” Here are some additional resources:
• Maria Alvarez: Actions, Thought Experiments, and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities
• A. J. Ayer: Freedom and Necessity
• Gregg Caruso: The Dark Side of Free Will (youtube.com)
• Clarence Darrow: Crime and Criminals (Address to the Prisoners in the Chicago Jail)
• John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Manuel Vargas, and Derk Pereboom: Four Views on Free Will
• Meghan Griffith: Free Will: The Basics
• R.E. Hobart: Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It
• David Hume: Of Liberty and Necessity
• Kristin M. Mickelson: The Manipulation Argument
• Adina Roskies: Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility
• Peter van Inwagen: The Powers of Rational Beings
• Susan Wolf: Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility
C
HAPTER6 You Know Nothing
Views and arguments advanced in this chapter are not necessarily endorsed by the author of the textbook, nor are they original to the author, nor are they meant to be consistent with arguments advanced in other chapters. Different chapters represent different philosophical perspectives.
You probably think you know all sorts of things about the world.
You know when your earliest class starts tomorrow. You know that it will be colder on average in February than in August, and that the sun will rise and set tomorrow. You know who the president is, you know where your family lives, you know how you celebrated your last birthday, you know some trivia—like the capital of Alaska—and you know some immediately obvious things, like that you’re reading a book right now.
I will argue that you don’t know any of these things. My aim will be to show that you don’t know anything about the world, by which I mean the external physical world. I won’t try to argue that you don’t know anything about your own internal states—like thoughts and feelings—nor will I try to argue that you don’t know anything about nonphysical things like numbers, for instance that 1+1=2. (The title of the chapter admittedly overstates things a bit.) I’ll begin by arguing that you don’t know what the world will be like in the future, not even one moment from now (sections 1-4).
Then I’ll argue that you don’t even know what the world is like presently, not even what’s happening right in front of you (sections 5-9).